Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Meet The Agency That Would Enforce Obama's Gun Control

By John Diedrich and Raquel Rutledge

A store calling itself Fearless Distributing opened early last year
on an out-of-the-way street in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood,
offering designer clothes, athletic shoes, jewelry and drug
paraphernalia.

Those working behind the counter, however, weren't interested in selling anything.

But the effort to date has not snared any major dealers or taken down
a gang. Instead, it resulted in a string of mistakes and failures,
including an ATF military-style machine gun landing on the streets of
Milwaukee and the agency having $35,000 in merchandise stolen from its
store, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found.

When the 10-month operation was shut down after the burglary, agents
and Milwaukee police officers who participated in the sting cleared out
the store but left behind a sensitive document that listed names,
vehicles and phone numbers of undercover agents.

And the agency remains locked in a battle with the building's owner,
who says he is owed about $15,000 because of utility bills, holes in the
walls, broken doors and damage from an overflowing toilet.

The sting resulted in charges being filed against about 30 people,
most for low-level drug sales and gun possession counts. But agents had
the wrong person in at least three cases. In one, they charged a man who
was in prison - as a result of an earlier ATF case - at the time agents
said he was selling drugs to them.

Other cases reveal that the agency's operation was paying such high
prices that some defendants bought guns from stores such as Gander
Mountain and sold them to the agents for a quick profit. The mistakes by
agents are troubling and suggest a lack of planning and oversight,
according to veterans of the ATF, who learned about the operation from
the Journal Sentinel. The newspaper combed through police reports, court
documents, social media and materials left behind by the ATF, all of
which provide a rare view inside an undercover federal operation.